A Joint Venture with eOne: A leader’s legacy of forgiveness

The streets of Verulam on the outskirts of Durban, South Africa, were unnaturally quiet for a Sunday afternoon. But it wasn’t just any Sunday. It was Feb. 11, 1990, the day Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was released from Victor Verster Prison after 27 years as a political prisoner.

Young as she was, nine-year-old school girl Joudel Naidoo (now Janoska) understood how profoundly important that afternoon was. She walked home along Verulam’s empty streets to watch, along with millions around the world, the historic event unfold on television.

“We all sat in our living room — my mother, grandmother, my cousin and our black maid — and watched it on the little box TV,” recalls Janoska, 31, today a Canadian citizen and mother of four who lives near Ottawa.

“I will never forget when Madiba,”— Mandela’s traditional Xhosa clan name — “walked out of the prison gates in a suit and he got into the baccie, a sort of open-back van, and there were hundreds and thousands of people shouting ‘Amandla! Amandla,” which is the Xhosa and Zulu for ‘power’. The look on his face … It was a look of pride and joy. I remember my grandmother saying, ‘He’s out, the ANC (African National Congress) are happy, but chaos will come from this.”

Prescient as those words were — the period after Mandela’s release was tumultuous enough that Janoska’s elementary school taught the students to recognize a siren indicating violent protesters were approaching — it also ushered in an era of ‘ubuntu’, a Nguni Bantu word that means openness, cooperation and humanity.

For Mandela, who died at the age of 95 on Dec. 5 and is the subject of the new film Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, ‘ubuntu’ was also the start of what he believed could be an ethnically cosmopolitan South Africa.

Shortly after being elected president of South Africa in 1994, he declared: “Each of us is as intimately attached to the soil of this beautiful country as are the famous jacaranda trees of Pretoria and the mimosa trees of the bushveld — a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.”

“Under apartheid, if you were non-white, you had to use the non-white door to shops or church,” says Janoska, whose family was of South Asian descent.

“If you were out after curfew, they could imprison you. If you were slightly defiant, they could pick you up. The white man was like a god that looked down on us. Even though we were middle class, we could only own a small business. My mother and grandmother even had white people spit at their feet.”

Once Mandela was elected president, sweeping out of power F.W. de Klerk, who later won the Nobel Peace Prize with Mandela for brokering the end of apartheid and ensuring multi-racial democracy, Janoska says it became a “very exciting time for us. Suddenly, we could apply for jobs, be doctors and lawyers and CEOs.”

Threatening as that was to the white elite —“the whites were very nervous,” she says — Mandela framed every change through a lens of fairness and reconciliation.

“I remember seeing Madiba stand back and sort of say, ‘Listen, freedom is freedom. I wasn’t fighting for part of freedom, but now that we have whole freedom, it doesn’t mean taking advantage of it.’ It was like he was saying he spent such a long time to get there, he didn’t want to take steps backwards.”

But Janoska says Mandela’s impact on her life and that of all South Africans went beyond mere politics and legislation. Every time she returns home to see her family, she sees evidence of change. There remain many problems in the country: there is extreme poverty and crime, and racism is still evident.

“But at the same time, in other areas, I also see more respect, more ubuntu, between people.”

“When it comes to Madiba’s legacy, forgiveness is the word that comes to mind. He stopped the whole world, didn’t think about individual cases and just forgave. He said, ‘Whatever happened to your people, it’s tragic and sad, but everyone has to forgive a little bit.’ He said, ‘Be proud you are South African. We don’t have to be different, we just have to be.’”